Casey Deaton 1976-2024

In the picture above, well, this was high school, Chris, Casey, and me. Three nerdy musketeers who found each other. Casey called this our “Sears pose”, like out of the Sears catalog.

My best friend died yesterday, Casey, or “Case”, after a three-year bout with colon cancer. He’d had his entire ass cut off, only for it to spread to his lungs, and it was the lung cancer that ended up killing him. I visited him a handful of times over the course of his treatment. I watched his decline in increments. Last time I saw him three weeks ago he told me that the cancer was like a spider web inside his lungs, an image straight out of a horror film. It was bad. He’d lost a bunch of weight and he was breathing oxygen from a tank, and his color had a tinge of gray at the edges.

Me and Chris took him to Ichiban in Tupelo for lunch and we stayed there a good two hours, just talking. He was aware that his time was short, but he was still sort of hopeful, almost like a child. He was kind of pretending that it was going to be okay. He said that he was going in for a Chemo treatment that upcoming Monday, and I didn’t understand that. Last ditch effort to hang on, I guess. We tried to talk as normal, and mostly we did. We reminisced a little bit. Talked about life a little bit. Casey talked about his children, and I know he was a loving father. I really want to report that. He was involved in every part of their lives, and he glowed when he talked about them. Casey had to fight back his tears at least three different times, telling us how much our friendship meant to him. Then, he insisted on paying for lunch.

Casey was Casey, all the way. Casey was the the most gentle man I ever knew, like gentle to a fault. He always had this child-like quality about him, like he never really grew up, like the wearing-down that happens to so many of us, the process of getting jaded, wasn’t working on him. People say this a lot, how so-and-so would give you the shirt off his back, but Casey would have done that. He’d do anything for you, and often without you having to ask. He’d just offer. When I was going through a hard time with my divorce and I took a job in Georgia, Casey helped me pack my moving van and then he took me and my girls out to eat barbeque.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been remembering all of my Casey stories, and telling those stories to my daughters. We went to band camp together at ICC. High school band festivals. Disneyworld. Tennis team. We rolled yards. We drank our first beers and smoked our first cigarettes. We organized backyard football games. We skipped school and went fishing. Over a round of golf at Bel-Air in Tupelo, Casey told me all about screwing his first girl.

We grew up together. He was my best friend.

For the halloween/yard-rolling season, we used to get these garbage bags full of shredded paper from my aunt who worked at a bank in town. This was a big deal for us, something we actually planned for; we’d rolled yards every year previous, but our senior year, Casey got a girlfriend, and his entire world became centered on her, so that when Chris and I went to pick him up for yard-rolling, he was nowhere to be found. Between us and her, he picked her, and he “ghosted” us. Remember, this was pre-cellphone, so someone could completely hide. In relaliation for such a bro-betrayal, we went ahead and rolled his yard, and they left their doors unlocked, so we trashed the interior with the shredded paper. Two days later, Casey evened the score. I was about to leave for school when I found my car stuffed with that paper, and little paper shreds were coming out of my air vents for weeks.

Our paths diverged after graduation. Casey went to Northeast and I went to to ICC. At least once I visited him at his dormroom at Northeast, and I remember he had a fry-daddy, and he was pretty excited about it. He’d stock up at the grocery store across the road and use the fry-daddy to fry up pizza rolls and chicken nuggets and french fries. He was connected to the Campus Country group at the school, and after that he served as a drummer for a band called The Deep Greens, who did alt-country, which was really just a twangy rock-n-roll. They put out a CD, and I wish I still had it, but years ago when I unloaded all my CDs I think it must have gone, too.

(Update: at Visitation today (March 21) I learned that a PHS classmate has a copy of that CD, and I think I’m going to get a hold of him and see if he’ll let me rip it.)

A desire for money did not seem to motivate Casey all that much. I admire that about him, and I’m kind of wired that way, too. He loved music. He played guitar and the drums and he could sing well enough, and at some point, the path must have become obvious to him, how he could combine these things. He started working at a Christian summer camp, Camp Lake Stevens, in Lafayette County, and our paths crossed again the summer of 1997 when I was a student at Ole Miss. I was living by myself in an apartment in Oxford, and somehow he got a hold of my landline phone number and gave me call. I ended up meeting him at Amy’s apartment, a girl who worked with him at the summer camp, and she was spending the weekends at her aparment in Oxford. Now, Amy was a stunner. She was on scholarship for the Ole Miss Modeling squad. I’m talking beautiful. Tall. Long legs. Brunette. She was something.

Well, she also happened to be a pretty cool chick, too, and I got to talking to her, and well, all’s fair in love, and I ended up stealing her right out from under him and dating her for a time, and I admit I was pretty proud of myself at the time, and I don’t know if Casey ever forgave me for that, because we never once talked about it.

Fast forward not even a year, because if I’m remembering correctly, it happened quickly, Casey marrying Heather. I knew nothing about Heather until she was Casey’s wife. I can’t verify it, but I always believed he did that so that I wouldn’t steal her, too. Honestly, he was just being smart because I probably would have tried. After the Amy treachery, he could put nothing past me. He literally went incommunicado, found a woman, and married her. He was the first of our original group to get married.

Casey never really worked. I mean, you know, he “worked”. He worked as a youth minister as his career, which enabled him to be the dear uncle figure at church, and play his guitar and sing a lot, and I cannot emphasize this enough, it really was the perfect role for him. He went on a missionary trip to England for a few years, like the English need missionaries. His life was pretty cool.

Heather stood by him all the way, and they had three children together, two girls and a boy. Whereas I’ve never had any lasting luck with women at all, at least to this point, Casey beat the system here, too, and found one of those unicorns that was in it for the long haul no matter what.

Casey’s attack vector on life allowed him to beat the system, against all odds. It should have chewed him up and spit him out, but instead it just cradled him and embraced him, for the most of it. The cancer end and essentially suffocating to death, well, that’s a bad way to have to go.

He was aware of that, too. That last time we interacted I just asked him, hey man, how does it feel to be so close to death? As in, how does it make you feel?

His answer: Angry. Not terror, which would be my answer. Anger. He was angry that it was being taken away from him, because he still had things he wanted to do. He wanted to walk his eldest daughter down the isle. He wanted to share a first beer with his son. He wanted to go to all the events, the concerts and sports games. He refinished drum sets with his son, and he wanted to do more of that.

He was a dear friend in the truest sense, and I didn’t have any of those to spare. I’m going to miss him.

Hey Case, man, I miss you already. I love you. If God's real up there, put in a good word for me.